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It is almost 10.30pm and I have had a busy day.  Every so often my mind has wandered to our magical evening and that I still haven’t finished writing about it.  My memories and that of the girls, we find, are quickly erasing the events of Saturday night, quite as if it were a dream.  This is always the way.  This is the way faerie magic works.  Therefore, I am keen to commit to paper tonight what the evening held for us so that I do not lose it forever.  As a Faerie Ring we hold our magical evenings as confidential, so I cannot divulge exactly what happened (our personal experiences), but I can give you a flavour of what we delved into.

All three of us took turns in every aspect of creating a magical circle, a sacred space.  This was the only time that I will allow them the book to refer to.  The next time we meet they know that they have to learn their words off by heart, as to read from a book while you create magic takes some of the magic away.

Tonight was to be Daisy and Alcina’s Faeriecraft Dedication and they were really looking forward to becoming Faerie Priestesses.  If you have my book Faeriecraft, you may be familiar with this particular rite which is in Chapter 8, The Faerie Temptress.  It seemed as though as soon as we cast our circle Daisy and Alcina became transformed into two fey beings.  They looked totally different to how they do in everyday life.  I believe that they shone; that they radiated a fey kind of beauty and the sight of them both dedicating themselves to faeriecraft was a very special moment for me.  They had both written poems to their chosen Faerie Kings and Queens for the dedication.  I was so proud of both of them and the atmosphere was almost effervescent, it felt as if the room was filled with soap bubbles of excitement.

I also explained to Daisy and Alcina that a faerie rite should never be taken too seriously.  Obviously the faeries had informed other occupants in my house to remind us of this as several times we were interrupted; a couple of times by gate-crashing mice.  They dared to make loud noises eating; a lot of crunching and munching was heard while we were concentrating on quiet moments, then by my dog who decided to come and make himself comfortable on the sofa and watch the proceedings while giving himself a thorough and very noisy wash!

Daisy and Alcina took part in every aspect of casting a circle.  Then our ‘work’ for that evening, which was to consecrate Alcina’s Book of Elfin, wand and my new wand which Daisy, had recently made for me from willow.  Then followed the faeriecraft dedications and finally they both blessed the chocolate cake that Daisy had made and the apple juice.  An offering of the cake was also left for the fey, which we placed on the doorstep of the beautiful faerie house which lives in my home.  Daisy and Alcina also banished the faerie circle.

When we had finished our evening of magic we all made sure that we were properly grounded and used techniques such as clapping our hands, stamping our feet and rubbing ourselves from the tops of our heads right down to our toes to disperse the energy and bring us back down to earth.  To make really sure of this, we made cinnamon and brown sugar on toast and had cups of tea.  It is always good practice to have a ‘feast’ after a magical working as food ‘earth’s’ us.

By now it was really late and a lot of yawning was going on.  We were so tired that we could not be bothered to get up and put ourselves to bed.  Thankfully we managed it in the end.

Thus began our happenings in the newly formed Daisy Faerie Ring, which will document the magical training of my students; Daisy and Alcina, both ‘teen’ Faerie Priestesses.  Over the next few days I will bring you up to date with how the faerie ring came about.  The next faerie rite that we will hold will be to celebrate Beltaine, apart from Samhain (Hallow’een) it is my favourite night of the year.

Daisy and Alcina have already started planning it… and the general consensus of opinion is that all noisy mice and dogs will not be invited next time.

I went to bed at about three last night, but I could not get to sleep until around four as I had so many exciting thoughts wisping through my mind about the faerie ring.  Everyone has woken up late and the two girls have slept very deeply and have had interesting dreams.  We discuss their dreams over breakfast and as soon as Daisy and Alcina are dressed they begin to write up their experiences of last night in their Books of Elfin.  Last night seems to have almost evaporated, dissolved, and vanished into a ‘poof’ of faerie dust as magical experiences always do the day after.  This is why I have in suggested that the girls write up their encounters as soon as possible so that they can remember with the greatest clarity.

So…last night, where I did I leave it?  Oh yes, we had all been beautifying ourselves for the magical night ahead.  Daisy and Alcina had gone to great lengths to look their best for the rite. They had spent many hours during last week altering a dress of Daisy’s that would become her special garment to be worn only for magic.  It was black with lots of embroidered silver flowers on it.  Then Daisy had cleverly taken some of the silver flowers from the unwanted material and fashioned her own one-of-a-kind faerie wings to match her dress exactly.  They were in the same black material and she had sewn the silver embroidered flowers onto the back where the two wings met in the middle.  If she had tried to buy those wings anywhere, she couldn’t have found any others more perfect.

Alcina was wearing a layered, fey-tattered dress together with sparkly, darkly purple and black wings.  They both looked perfect and utterly pixie-touched.  Now glittered, powdered, preened and bewitching we went about creating our sacred space ready to meet the faeries.

I have often observed that whenever I have students they end up teaching me more than I taught them.  I have also learnt that there are no exceptions to this rule.  I never fail to notice also that every student who comes to me, however much magical knowledge I have gained so far, always comes to me as my magical equal in spiritual terms.  I remember how green I was at the age of seventeen when I first stepped into the Spiritualist Developing Circle alone with my first teacher (who is now 83) and embarked upon the introductory training of becoming a Medium and learning how to develop and use my psychic abilities.  At that point I had so much to learn and have since encountered a rich inner life of psychic experiences.  Even after twenty four years of training, study, magical partnerships where I have astral travelled beyond my wildest dreams and have wonderful spiritual happenings; I still enter into every teaching experience knowing that my student has eclipsed all those years and stands before me as my spiritual equal. They have the spirituality that I have to learn and study for, innate in them.  I know that although I will teach them how to practise their magical art safely and with all the advantages of my experience to help them, I am always humbled to be standing before them, as I know that secretly; I am the student.  How clever the faeries are…in all ways… and infinitely wise.

Back to our magical night.  I am showing Daisy how to light the self-igniting charcoal to sprinkle my homemade Queen Mab’s Kiss incense upon.  The instant the charcoal rests on the thurible it releases pungent wafts of rituals and magic long past.  It takes me back to all my years of rituals with my coven in England and my previous faerie ring which disbanded a year ago.  As we use the same thurible burner for each ritual, a little incense, ash and magic is deposited and every time the charcoal burns it brings back those scents to immediately remind me and it never fails to transport me from the mundane to the magical.  Daisy was watching me intently with her green eyes as I had told her that it was going to be her job to light the charcoal when we have our next evening of faerie magic.  We busied ourselves preparing our little faerie altar which was an old suitcase (only the best) covered with some pretty muslin.  On it we had daffodils, a wooden goblet of apple juice, a wooden plate of Daisy’s best vegan chocolate cake, a teeny weeny faerie offering bowl of cake for our fey guests, our wands, a candle, wooden bowls of salt and water and a wooden disc with a pyrographed septagram upon it.  Every so often we would get poked in the eye with faerie wings as we dashed about, determined to get started before the witching hour was upon us.

In the run up to this magical moment we had had the most peculiar day.  Things had just had a haphazardness about them from the very start.  If there was an opportunity to trip over something, it had happened, milk had been spilt in a spectacular fashion on the floor, we had bumped into one another what felt like a dozen times, Daisy kept losing things, there had been a gas leak, by teatime we had already cooked for nine people (don’t ask), Daisy had sore knees, I had a tummy ache and Alcina needed food – now.

The minute we switched off the lights in the living room and I asked the girls for us all to hold hands in the centre of the room, our muddled, fuddled, bizarre day slipped away from us as if it had been a cloak made of silken material, slipping effortlessly off our shoulders.  We had made it.  We had arrived.  The Land of Elf was just in touch.  Oh the bliss, bliss of bliss-ness.

We Faerie Priestesses do Solemnly Swear

to Ride the Kelp Stalk of Magic Higher

and Further Than Any Other in the;

Daisy Faerie Ring

It is 2.20am on Sunday 18^th April 2010 and strangely I know perfectly well that I will not be able to get a wink of sleep unless I commit even just a few words of what has happened tonight.  We three are so excited!  Tonight was the first true meeting of the Daisy Faerie Ring, so called because of the many daisy-weirdnesses (a word? I think not!) which have happened in the lead up to us forming our new magical group.

I’m not even going to begin from the beginning, that’s just so unexciting for now.  No, I’m going to plunge you and me into the deep end of our faerie magicality, which is the thing stopping me from going to sleep tonight. 

The day began at 8.20am Saturday morning when Daisy (we’re using our magical names for the purpose of this blog) was dropped off at The Mousehole (that’s my house, for future reference) on a wet, wild and disgustingly dreary morning.  She bounced in and so our day unfolded in a flurry of cake-making, eyelash-curling, poem writing, daisy and daffodil picking, giggling, Lady Grey tea drinking, brown-sugar-and-cinnamon-on-toast-eating kind of day.  Before we realised it was 10 o’clock at night.  Then the fun began.

My bedroom was turned into a kind of den that looked like, smelt like and tasted like the atmosphere of a dressing room for Faerie Queen Titania’s host of faeries in a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Daisy was hogging the mirror as she deftly put her purple hair into five pony tails, Alcina had not the luxury of a proper mirror so was using any shiny surface to persuade her eyelashes to appear ‘longer and fuller than ever before,’ because ‘she was worth it.’ Nixie, that’s me, was last in the queue for any mirror or remotely shiny surface so merely floated around trying sparkly pairs of shoes on for my role as Daisy and Alcina’s Faerie Godmother.  The atmosphere was getting more bubbly and sparkly by the minute as tiaras were positioned, faerie wings were adjusted and wands were grasped at the ready.  By 11pm we were all looking our elfin-best for the first ever night of magic of the Daisy Faerie Ring.